ALL BALL NERVE CENTER — Story time: A couple of years ago, Wifey and I were on vacation in Europe, and we were staying in a hotel where, once inside your room, you were required to insert your room key into a slot in the wall to be able to turn on the lights and power inside your room. This seems to be a common feature of hotels in Europe, or at least several of the places I’ve stayed. We’d spent the day sightseeing, and had reached the point where my wife wanted to go shopping and I wanted to take a nap. So I went back to the hotel and went on up the room. I was standing in the hallway outside our door when I realized my wife had our only key to the room with her. I was going to head back down to the front desk and grab a spare when the maid walked by, recognized me, and let me into the room. But once inside, I realized I couldn’t power up the room.So no lights, no TV, nothing.

It was only then, reduced to improvising, that I started digging through my wallet, where I found my old Hollywood Video rental card. Even though we were well into the age of streaming video and movies on demand, I somehow had not cleaned out my wallet in years and was still toting this useless card around. But wait, at least as far as the useless part: I pulled out that card and slid it into the light switch slot, and it fit perfectly. And everything was illuminated.

I tell this story because yesterday on Twitter, we found out that NBA Hall of Famer and Fox Sports analyst Gary Payton still carries around his Blockbuster video card. Blockbuster may have closed their last U.S. location a few weeks back, but hey, if it’s good enough for The Glove, it’s good enough for me…